Get Yr Blood Sucked Out

Barsuk; 2006

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Kevin and Anita Robinson live the kind of life they make TV shows out of, a married couple making music in their home together and touring the country to promote it. Maybe some day they'll have kids and groom them into band members, but for now just the two of them make plenty of noise, and Get Yr Blood Sucked Out is confident, psychedelic, hard-hitting, and the best noise they've made yet.

The duo's sound has sharpened, with more spacious production, simpler arrangements, and more refined songcraft: Where their three previous records all took a little time to marinate, this one is strikingly immediate. It opens with a beat and feel reminiscent of Blur's "Tender", but the harmony is much more tense, and rather than a gospel choir, "Believer" has two voices harmonizing, calm to the point of sinister, and Anita's screaming lead guitar. Her guitar is one of the album's biggest trump cards-- in an era when flashy leads are hard to come by it's something of a relief to hear economical fretboard fireworks like the squawking, melodic solo on "From the Devil Himself".

Not that her husband gives her much slack to pick up. His drum parts are engaging and frequently memorable as hooks in their own right. If nothing else, it seems clear that touring has honed their skill as musicians to a fine point, and this may be why they've had the confidence to keep the arrangements more basic this time out. Whatever the reason, it works beautifully. "Faster Than a Dead Horse" is a masterful pop song, with Kevin providing killer "bah bah" backing vocals for Anita's double-tracked lead. She can't wait to sling her guitar, cutting loose after just one verse and sending up a distorted torrent after the second.

While the uptempo tracks bring the crunchy thunder, the quieter ones can be just as gripping. "Special Thing", sung by Kevin, is almost wispy, adrift in reverb, but it sticks with you, almost as well as the song that follows. "Never Be Like Yesterday" opens with a quick little snippet of Mercury Rev-ish saw and ambience, sliding into a comfortable piano groove with fluttering guitar accents. The arrangement perfectly matches the weariness of its protagonist, one half of a couple who stayed up all night arguing.

There's of course a possibility that they wrote that song together after living through it first, but regardless of whether or not they fight just like every other married couple, they're on the same page when it comes to their music, and they could hardly have outlined their new focus better than they do with the song title "We Do Not Fuck Around".